What looks like a miracle is really maintenance, and maintenance is exhausting. The quieter streets are the product of overlapping, imperfect systems all grinding forward at once: cops who keep following leads when the cameras leave, violence interrupters who answer phones after midnight, caseworkers who refuse to give up on families cycling through crisis. Safer neighborhoods are not proof that danger has vanished; they are proof that pressure, money, and attention have finally been pointed in the same direction long enough to matter.
That’s exactly why this moment is so perilous. As headlines soften, the temptation grows to cut “extras” that were never extra at all—outreach teams, trauma counseling, rental support, youth jobs, patient investigative work. If we dismantle that scaffolding, the next economic shock or viral outrage won’t create a new crisis; it will simply expose how quickly we let this brief, fragile peace decay.
